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Sinclair Ransomware Attack


Jess

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KBOI in Boise is not airing Jeopardy! or Wheel, either. 8:00 ET/6:00 MT was CBSN and 6:30 was the West Coast feed of CBSEN.

 

KDBC in El Paso did air the shows, but the commercial breaks just had a tech difficulties/please stand by card. Right before Wheel started, they actually aired the slate that is normally not supposed to be aired.


 

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I won't be around tonight to see what happens with KIMA's Big Bang Theory and Simpsons episodes, but I wonder if they too are missing local ads. Young and the Restless seemed fine this morning with local ads and ID bumpers displaying during the break around 11:30.

Just a screwed up situation all around. Sinclair won't be in good shape for a while.

 

I wonder which country got away with this attack? Russia? China? Will we ever know?

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So during Stargirl and Supergirl, KOCB seemed to be having issues with local commercial break inserts hanging (i.e., abruptly pausing at the end of the last commercial of each longer local break and staying paused for about a minute) at the points where the station is supposed to immediately dump back to the CW network feed. Is any other Sinclair station experiencing this particular issue?

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1 hour ago, VHSgoodiesWA said:

I won't be around tonight to see what happens with KIMA's Big Bang Theory and Simpsons episodes, but I wonder if they too are missing local ads. Young and the Restless seemed fine this morning with local ads and ID bumpers displaying during the break around 11:30.

Just a screwed up situation all around. Sinclair won't be in good shape for a while.

 

I wonder which country got away with this attack? Russia? China? Will we ever know?

 

KIMA is airing BBT with commercials right now.

 

 

No Jeopardy! or presumably Wheel of Fortune on KVAL in Eugene, OR. Repeat of CBS Evening News is airing right now at 7:00 PT, unless it's just the P+ feed not airing the shows.

 

KBAK Bakersfield, KAEF Eureka, KATU Portland, and KOMO Seattle are all airing either Jeopardy! or Wheel right now with proper commercials. KBAK's P+ feed is airing CBSN, though.

 

 

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WSYX/WTTE looks mostly back to normal. No L3s and a lot of syndicated Sinclair stories airing. Also sports seems to be cut short. 

 

Sunday night they had about 8 minutes of local weather and a short in studio story from a reporter and then tossed to Sinclair programming. They did have the logo bug up but no other graphics other than weather. 

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Another side-effect of the Sinclair troubles....this time at WEAR.

 

Their 10pm newscast at WEAR is usually an hour long and postpones Jimmy Kimmel Live! to 11pm CT.

 

Because they presumably cannot air tape-delayed programming, they are forced to air Kimmel....."Live" , or in patten at it's intended start time.

 

Even the ABC local bug trigger is working!

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My sources tell me it could be WEEKS before operations are back to normal at these stations.   It sounds like the affected computers are rendered worthless and have to be replaced outright.  When you factor in what runs on these and their ties to the network, it may as well have been a bomb that went off and destroyed everything in it's path.   The only usable parts are the systems that were "off the grid"...basically any computer or device that was either turned off or not hooked up at the time.

 

How many days was Cox down?  This could be devastating to Sinclair.

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1 hour ago, tyrannical bastard said:

My sources tell me it could be WEEKS before operations are back to normal at these stations.   It sounds like the affected computers are rendered worthless and have to be replaced outright.  When you factor in what runs on these and their ties to the network, it may as well have been a bomb that went off and destroyed everything in it's path.   The only usable parts are the systems that were "off the grid"...basically any computer or device that was either turned off or not hooked up at the time.

 

How many days was Cox down?  This could be devastating to Sinclair.

Cox was down by my count several days. So even if say stations like KOMO and WJLA get back online fast it's going to take a long time for everyone else to get back online.

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WPBN was able to air Wheel and Jeopardy! today but without commercials.

 

KBOI appears to be back to normal with syndie and local ad programming.

 

KDBC is still having problems. Portions of their newscast appear to be prerecorded and played back on a Mac computer, and their end card is shown on monitors instead of being directly fed. Their airing of Jeopardy! today had the slate. After that finished, they played a stock footage clip of aerial views of El Paso twice. After that, Wheel of Fortune started with the first three seconds or so cut off (so the opening was just "...of... Fortune!")

 

Here's the end of their 5:30 newscast and the start of Jeopardy!

 

 

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17 hours ago, JCB4TV said:

Does anyone know whether Sinclair paid the ransom, or are they trying to recover the hard way?

I haven't seen anything, but oftentimes companies don't like to admit that they paid out whatever money was necessary. I'm curious to know how much money stations are losing from being unable to run local ads.

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17 hours ago, JCB4TV said:

Does anyone know whether Sinclair paid the ransom, or are they trying to recover the hard way?

 

They might be legally barred from doing so as Evil Corp. is subject to (and trying to evade) US sanctions.

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Within Sinclair’s Oklahoma City duopoly, the effects of the ransomware attack on KOKH/KOCB seem to effect each station programming-wise in different ways. KOKH still has been running only a portion of its 7 1/2-hour news schedule (preempting Good Day OK and the 11:00 a.m. newscast, with The National Desk replacing the midday show Tuesday and Wednesday and TBD programming filling that hour today [Thursday], while still running their 5:00, 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. news and airing repeats of Living Oklahoma), but syndicated programs aren’t affected as much. (Admittedly, I haven’t watched KOKH’s programming much lately, so I haven’t noticed any issues that mirror its sister station with syndicated and Fox shows.)

 

The issues with KOCB, OTOH, have been more noticeable. Local commercial break inserts have been hanging, a la how a desktop application just stops responding, during CW programming (instead of immediately dumping back to the CW network feed, the last image of the “hanging” ad sticks around for a minute before being overridden to the network feed), and carriage of syndicated programs has been scattershot each day: the station has been running the exact same episodes of Family Feud that aired Monday in its regular noon [secondary, older episode cycle] and 6:00 p.m. [primary, current season cycle] slots over the last few days, and repeated the episodes of Funny You Should Ask and 25 Words or Less that were able to air Wednesday today, but has aired the correct episodes of TMZ, TMZ Live and Nick Cannon each day; TBD programs ran during the morning and midday hours (up to 2:00 p.m. on the former, then until noon on the latter) on Tuesday and Wednesday (after being able to air the full daytime lineup on Monday), before restoring the regular schedule; and Two and a Half Men and Mike & Molly were replaced by one of Sinclair’s Spotlight on America investigative specials during the 11:00 p.m. hour on Wednesday. Local ads during syndicated programs, though, have been running with little issue.

 

On Friday, KOCB is scheduled to an HS football game between Putnam North at Midwest City as part of its Friday Night Rivals game showcase, but I’m not sure if they’re able to do so without issue, much less be able to air the CW Friday lineup on tape delay after the game (as the station has been doing since The CW added its Saturday lineup) if the duopoly’s ability to run tape-delayed network shows has been impacted.

 

Update (10/22): The FNR telecast was able to air (with full graphics), and The CW Friday lineup did air following the game (indicating KOCB is able to run a delayed CW feed in some capacity, if not by recording the Eastern Time feed through the duopoly’s own internal systems, then by pulling in the network’s Pacific Time feed).

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1 hour ago, Samantha said:

 

They might be legally barred from doing so as Evil Corp. is subject to (and trying to evade) US sanctions.

If proven to be the case, is there any legal way for Sinclair to be able to recover anything from this?

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3 minutes ago, ScottSchell said:

KTUL was effected to where they couldn’t do a full Good Morning Oklahoma newscasts they were just doing 6:30am till this morning when they started at 5:30am they also couldn’t produce Good Day Tulsa not sure about a midday.

 

*affected

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53 minutes ago, ScottSchell said:

KTUL was effected to where they couldn’t do a full Good Morning Oklahoma newscasts they were just doing 6:30am till this morning when they started at 5:30am they also couldn’t produce Good Day Tulsa not sure about a midday.

 

Was KTUL able to air syndies, at least? I don't see any "Where is ______?" complaints on their Facebook other than the morning news.

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